Timothy Birdnow

When Gutenberg created his marvelous machine to make endless copies of literature he had no way of knowing he was creating a revolution that would shake the world to it's very foundations. One of the things it did was to allow the Bible to be mass produced and where a priest held the Word of God in his own hands and disseminated it to the congregation it became possible for every man to be his own priest (assuming he could read).

Aue; there's the rub. Most people couldn't read ; why teach children when there was nothing TO read? So the revolution was slowed a bit by illiteracy, but there was a revolution nonetheless, and it started with a revolt against the Catholic Church. The Protestants began building schools so everyone could read the Bible.

The Reformation could never have happened without the printing press.

Now, there was much to admire in the Reformation. It certainly forced the Catholic Church to clean up it's act (something quite necessary after the massive corruption of, say, Pope Alexander VI who was one of the Borgia family and his reign was during the Renaissance. But it sparked a spirit of revolution, and it was latched onto by dark forces, such as Deism and Atheism, and this sparked a series of Revolutions starting with the benign American Revolution (which was too tame for a few of the rebels like Thomas Paine) but worse the French. None of those would have happened without the printing press. The ideals of the Enlightenment spread like wildfire through what was then called Christendom, and the late Enlightenment philosophers would create radically new ideas that would spark the absolute worst impulses in Man. Rousseau, Voltaire, and in Britain David Hume would all promote a dark vision of radical individualism and at the same time collectivism. That would be followed in the 19th century by the German lile Nietzche or Schopenhaur.

Naziism and Socialism were both ideas spawned by Rousseau, and Karl Marx just wanted to tack a "scientific veneer" on socialism. He called it "scientific socialism" and pretended his was entirely evidence and reason-based, but it was no different than any of the tripe peddled by the more primitive socialists of the day.

Anyway the printing press sparked all of these revolutions and continues to do so to this day, only we have ever faster and more interesting forms of communication.

But the bigger they are the harder they fall.

This article takes a gander at civilizational collapse, going bac to the Celts in Europe and looking at the Bronze Age and a couple of other collapses. He's right; we are way overdue for another.

As he points out, the Bronze Age ended when tin became scarce due to trade route collapses and the people of that time started making iron, thus the Iron Age was born out of the Bronze Age.

The thing is, we've had several revolutions in the last few hundred years and I doubt we could do something new given the height our technology reached. If our electronics should die (and there are ways they could) it would be hard to replace them with something better.

We are already facing something named the Knowledge Crunch. This is a problem stemming from too much to learn for any one person so our rate of technological growth and worse, our ability to operate our technology, will start to fail. People will only be able to work on parts of things and eventually not even that; it will require AI to pull the threads together for a lot of the systems we have become totally dependent upon.

We see this in the Climate Change debate; the scientists who are so often quoted are only familiar with a very limited area of climate, and they rely solely on the good word of people in other fields when climate is influenced by, say, solar activity. So the scientists THINK they know what they are talking about but they are unaware of other things, like the impact of cosmic rays on climate, and so they defer to professional organizations for input, organizations usually controlled by government money or funded by liberal private organizations. So research suffers because nobody is willing to learn more than one discipline and unable to conceive of how these things interrelate.

The end result is a science establishment that moves in lockstep and defends an orthodoxy of opinion they themselves created. It's the knowledge crunch writ large.

This will only gt worse the more we learn.

There is another problem, one pointed out by Nietzche back in the 19th century. Science is about questioning assumptions. And of course it's publish or perish and so every researcher wants to make a big splash. The end result is researchers begin questioning their fundamental assumptions - such as the Universe is logical, knowable, an that human reason can find common ground with others.

This has been eroding for some time. The idea of a subjective reality has come to be the norm "my truth" as opposed to "the truth" is common. And we really see it with the trans issue and the idea of multiple "genders" because who are we to say there are only two? That's not "their truth"!

But this infests all the sciences these days, even physics and Astronomy and other such. To a lesser degree than psychology, which was always like silly putty, but now it's everywhere. Physics has it bad because quantum mechanics long ago adopted the Copenhagen Interpretation, which says that human observation actually alters reality. This did not sit well with Edwin Schroedinger, who famously did the "Cat in the Box" thought experiment. He argued "put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison that will break at an unpredictable time. Then at that point the cat is both dead and alive until you open the box and collapse the wavefront". Contrary to popular opinion this was not intended to explain Quantum Physics but to criticize it. Niels Bohr, when confronted with this, said "You got it". Albert Einstein also criticized this, saying "God does not play dice with the Universe". At the quantum level it appears God does, at least as WE see it (no doubt He is still in control He just makes it appear to us we are on a driverless racecar).

So this and Einstein's Relativity was moved by philosophers into the mainstream of culture. Now science is schizophrenic, with some voices talking about absolute Truth (when it's convenient) and at other times talking about the subjective nature of reality.

That's why we have such nasty fights over global warming; the warmiacs insist they hold absolute truth, but when challenged with adverse material they switch to subjectivism and say we are in the pocket of Big Oil or whatnot.

This is not a long term stable situation. This kind of refusal to face reality and to admit we are not gods is going to bite us in the posterior and HARD. Our culture will be unable to survive it.

I suspect something will take down our electronics. Without those we will be deaf and blind and isolated - and civilization will have to start that long, brutal climb back up the mountain we had moved so easily. And Manking may eschew the kraken of big technology because so many had already despised it when times were good. If it fails we may never choose to rebuild it.

I just hope I'm not here when the end comes; it will be worse than anything ever imagined. Way too many of us and not enough food. I don't know what human meat tastes like but I'll bet it tastes like a greasy chicken! Bon Apetite'!

Posted by: Dana Mathewson at October 22, 2026 11:31 PM (LsX8Y)

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at October 23, 2026 07:12 AM (oflqW)

Hide Comments | Add Comment